Mafia

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Grand thievery in the Al Capone era shoots its way onto Xbox and PS2.

By IGN

We'll try our best to avoid calling The Gathering's Mafia something snotty like Grand Theft Auto: 1929 but it's going to be tough. The popular PC game is making its way to consoles in 2004 with all of the gangsterism and gameplay found in the original plus a few console-only enhancements. In Mafia follows the story of Tommy Angelo and his criminal adventures in the fictional city of Lost heaven. At a glance the game looks and feels like you're playing through the story of Tommy Vercetti and his criminal adventures in the fictional City of Vice.

You have the living city of Lost Heaven --said to be a combination of Chicago, New York and San Francisco-- to explore and Tommy can interact with most objects, vehicles and citizens around town. This usually translates into you shooting, crashing and just generally laying waste to different parts of Lost Heaven. The game's main story mode will have you stealing, assassinating, blowing up and whooping ass in the name of your family's don. Like we've seen in other games, you'll have to be aware of innocent pedestrians, pesky cops and other innocents and obstacles that can quickly complicate your task. On your way to murder some annoying do-gooder, you might have the brilliant idea to simply pull a drive-by and drop him and his crew in one easy pass. However, for every time such a ploy works to perfection, the next time some nosey cop might be rolling or strolling by and then you've got two problems to deal with. This system has proven to be appealing in both Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City and it works even in a Prohibition Era setting. Everything just looks older.

Some adjustments had to be made bringing Mafia over to the consoles. Aiming using the analog sticks on the Xbox and PS2 controllers presents a totally different feel compared to the mouse-and-keyboard system the game was initially designed to use. Because of this, a limited auto-aim feature has been introduced in both console versions. Using the shoulder buttons on the Dualshock 2 controllers and the black and white buttons on the Xbox controllers will cause the aiming cursor to cycle through multiple enemies on the horizon. You have to move the aiming cursor yourself using the left analog stick and get it at least in the vicinity of the bad guys before you can start tapping the auto-aim controls. Driving in Lost Heaven still feels like you're pushing an 80 year old whip, but the speed limiter feature (very handy indeed) has been upgraded so that you can now cruise at 60 mph instead of the extremely slow 40 mph that you were limited to in the PC version.

While you still get the 20 missions in the main story mode, Illusion Softworks has separated a free ride mode and a racing mode into their own self contained experiences. The free ride mode lets you get the most out of the living city by giving you the time you need to explore and interact with all of the stuff going on in Lost Heaven. The story mode often puts time pressure during missions or otherwise limits the freedom you'd need to really tear up the city at your leisure. When you're free riding you can carjack, murder and steal all you want to earn money and to really get all of the criminal activity out of your system. This also one way to make sure you enjoy the excellent driving physics of the old hoopties in Mafia and get a good sense of what it was like to swing a convertible land yacht around some city streets. If that's not enough, the dedicated racing mode the developers added might be.

The racing mode features a full championship with multiple races and race categories. Another company could've packaged this mode as an entire game and called it "Extreme Model T Racing" but thankfully it fits as a console-only feature within Mafia. The combination of splendid driving physics and the nasty enemy driver AI makes the races dynamic and exciting. The courses are inspired by locales in and around Lost Heaven but they're all original tracks with their own obstacles and dangers. Staying on the track isn't always necessary, but you have to keep in mind that you're driving a vehicle from the 1920s and they're not accustomed to going too far off-road. The racing mode along with free ride and the main campaign adds another worthwhile layer to an already rich single player experience.

Mafia has come over from the PC intact as far as content is concerned but there is a noticeable drop off in visual quality on both Xbox and PS2. Fans familiar with the game on PC will no doubt react to the very obvious draw-in that occurs in the downtown areas of Lost Heaven. It was certainly more dramatic in the PS2 version, which hits store shelves Tuesday, than it was in the Xbox version, which ships at an unspecified later date.